Norman Winarsky: 12. AI in mainstream applications: driven by data

What do you believe is the root cause that we are seeing so many artificial intelligences entering into more mainstream applications?
The root cause of artificial intelligence entering mainstream applications is particularly since it's now come to the point where it's capable of doing things well and accurately that has never before been possible. Now why is that? Why can artificial intelligence all of a sudden become possible? In fact in my lifetime it's always been twenty years away every year. So why now? Why is artificial intelligence becoming possible? One is certainly the processing power of the mobile device. Secondly, the bandwidth communications. Third, the Web clients are made possible to interface to, they're easy to get to, they're easy to come to. Fourth, the cloud services that can do this extensive processing that's necessary to learn about you, learn who you are and personalize that information, amazing what can be done.
But most important, the ability to collect and amass data about you, how you speak, what you say, and all the world's data, that kind of big data that's being collected is enabling the artificial intelligence systems to learn. They're learning statistically in some cases, and models such as grammar models and the other, what we do, how we do it, what we say and how we experience all these, and how we solve all these problems. With all that, that kind of capability then can be used to train, to teach, basically, the artificial intelligence systems. Also, of course, the researchers have had an incredible success in their algorithm development. So new algorithms are possible. These new algorithms have been developed over many, many years, many under DARPA programmes and the like, but now they're learning, they're being useful in the wild, they're useful in our day-to-day life. They can be part of your day-to-day life, they don't just have to be sitting in a back-end server collecting information, let's say, about inventory on a product, which is where artificial intelligence or learning systems were used in the past. You're going to see it everywhere, and because it can help you. In the end, why does a product spread, why is it useful? It's because there's a need, there's a pain. These products can help you in your daily life, they can be power tools for the individual.